WASHINGTON — Soon after her diabetes was diagnosed, 7-year-old Sonia Sotomayor decided she would
not depend on the adults in her life — a distant, overworked mother; a doomed, alcoholic father —
for the daily shots of insulin that would keep her alive.

So along with the morning routine of getting breakfast and brushing her teeth, she’d pull a
chair up to the stove and boil water to sterilize a syringe and needle, measure carefully, and
inject herself before leaving her South Bronx apartment for school.

In an extremely personal memoir to be published today, the 58-year-old Sotomayor writes candidly
about how her lifelong disease and the sense of “existential independence” she developed after the
early death of her father fueled her rise from the poverty of the projects to the exclusive enclave
of the Supreme Court.

My Beloved World, which is being published in English and Spanish, will reintroduce the
nation to the first Latina justice — her publicity blitz includes a profile on
60 Minutes, a sit-down with Oprah Winfrey, excerpts in
People magazine and a national tour.

The book does not deal with her three years on the Supreme Court — she warns readers not to try
to divine how her personal views inform her jurisprudence — and tells the story of her life only
until her appointment to the federal bench 20 years ago.

One of the reasons for writing it, she said in a recent interview in her chambers at the court,
is, “There are so many people with pieces of my story that they identify with and give them
hope.

“I needed to honor that expectation in some way, and show it was a role that could be important
for a Supreme Court justice.”

She reveals that her disease nearly took her life more than once and that part of the reason she
never had children was a fear she would not be around to raise them. She writes frankly that her
independence played a role in the amicable break-up of her marriage to her high-school sweetheart,
Kevin Noonan (although she remains hopeful there will be another serious relationship in her
life).

If her story is in many ways a familiar American tale of self-reliance and ambition, starting
with the desire to win the gold stars dispensed by a fifth-grade teacher, the setting stands
apart.

There’s the tiny Bronx apartment where her Puerto Rican-born parents spoke only Spanish and her
father, Juan, drank himself to death behind a closed bedroom door. There were her beloved
grandmother’s Saturday-night parties, filled with food and music and ending with a
velada, or seance. There was a poor but tightly woven community so contained that
Sotomayor did not venture into Manhattan until she was in high school.

It is also a modern story in ways that are rarely associated with Supreme Court justices.

Sotomayor’s mother, Celina, a nurse, moonlighted at a methadone clinic. A brilliant but fragile
cousin, Nelson, was addicted to heroin and died of AIDS complications; she realized just before his
death that she once unwittingly had driven him to score drugs.

She notes that affirmative action is responsible for her admission to Princeton University and
Yale Law School and that being Latino helped in her judicial ambitions. Being valued as a Latina,
she writes, was a welcome change from the times in her life she had been referred to by an
anti-Latino slur.

She mentions often in the book worrying that she was outmatched intellectually by classmates and
colleagues but confident that she could overcome any deficit by buckling down, working harder,
studying longer.

“I came to accept during my freshman year that many of the gaps in my knowledge and
understanding were simply limits of class and cultural background, not lack of aptitude or
application as I’d feared,” she writes. “I honestly felt no envy or resentment, only astonishment
at how much of a world there was out there and how much of it others already knew. The agenda for
self-cultivation that had been set for my classmates by their teachers and parents was something I’d
have to develop for myself.”

After disappointing grades her freshman year at Princeton, Sotomayor bought grammar books and
vocabulary texts and practiced each lunch hour at her summer job. She eventually flourished,
winning Princeton’s top academic prize and graduating
summa cum laude.

Later, at Yale, a recruiter for a Washington law firm told Sotomayor that the problem with
affirmative action was that “You have to wait to find out whether the person is qualified.”

Sotomayor filed a complaint, and the resulting controversy nearly led to the firm’s being
disinvited to interview at the law school.

Sotomayor writes: “When the anger, the upset and the agitation had passed, a certainty remained:
I had no need to apologize that the look-wider, search-more affirmative action that Princeton and
Yale practiced had opened doors for me. That was its purpose: to create the conditions whereby
students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were
unaware was even being run.”

The sentiments are strikingly different from those held by Sotomayor’s colleague on the bench,
Justice Clarence Thomas, who also was admitted to Yale Law under an affirmative-action program and
graduated five years before her.

Thomas is a fierce opponent of race-based admissions, convinced, as he wrote in his own memoir,
My Grandfather’s Son, that it cheapens the accomplishments of minorities by implying they
need special help.

Sotomayor can be imposing and stern on the bench, a dominating questioner who at times seems to
try her colleagues’ patience. She acknowledges an intensity “that can be forbidding to people.”

But in person she laughs easily, and, after writing such a frank book, she does not hesitate to
answer personal questions. She has an international network of friends, mentors, family and
godchildren, and she entertains at poker parties at her new place near U Street.

She hates being thought of as a workaholic. “My definition of a workaholic is someone who gets
enjoyment only from work,” she said in the interview. “That’s not true for me. ... I love life, and
I love people and I love experiences.”